Camped on a bit of old ice, surrounded by new ice.
Date: March 17, 2009 Location: N83° 56.895' W074 10.629' Time Traveled: 8 hours 30 minutes Distance Traveled: 6.0 nautical miles AM Temperature: -36°F Wind: ~5 knots out of the SW clear skies, sunny, good contrast
By: John Huston
Audio Transcript:
"This is John calling with a dispatch. Today's date, March 17th, Happy St. Patrick's Day everybody. Our 16th day of travel. Today we traveled 8 hours and 30 minutes and covered 6.0 nautical miles, our biggest day of travel so far, so we are quite happy about that.
On the Arctic Ocean we live on sea ice and it's a very dynamic environment. And sea ice is normally classified into a few different categories and today I'll talk about multi-year ice, which is called old sea ice, and new sea ice, which is just one year old. Up until recently the Arctic Ocean was, by and large, multi-year sea ice. Then starting in 2005 and continuing, there's been more and more first-year sea ice. First-year sea ice is a lot less resilient due to climate change and increases in temperature. It melts a lot faster. However, it also has less snow on it most of the time which makes it for better skiing
About half of our trip is expected to be on new sea ice, and that's the second half of the trip, from about 86 degrees north onward through the North Pole. And if you look at the National Snow and Ice Data Center graphics, which are taken off a NASA satellite, there are a few on our website and a few on the NSIDC homepage that are just fantastic, you'll see that over the past few years the old sea ice has decreased and the young sea ice, one year old, has increased by a large proportion. 2008 was the second lowest sea ice area coverage on record for the summer and that was taken in September. The previous low was last year 2007 and the previous low before that was 2005. How that impacts our expedition, we will find out.
We're camped right near a whole bunch of new sea ice that is very stable. It looks like it's perfect skiing, like one inch of snow on top of ice, and that hopefully will take us north quite a bit tomorrow. However, it makes for hard camping because we don't have ice screws, we just have snow pegs, and we need a bunch of snow to hold down the tent. We have snow flaps on the side of the tent that hold snow that's secure. So that's a little bit about sea ice. We've been traveling almost entirely over old sea ice which is why we are dealing with so many heavy snow formations.
All right, thanks for listening and we will check in tomorrow. Good night. Happy St. Patrick's Day everybody!"
Tyler gets the bearing from the DeLorme PN-40 GPS.
Date: March 16, 2009 Location: N83° 50.895' W074 13.882' Time Traveled: 8 hours 30 minutes Distance Traveled: 4.8 nautical miles 371 nautical miles to North Pole
By: Tyler Fish
Audio Transcript:
"Hello, this is the update for March 16th. It is day 15 of the expedition.
There are probably many of you out there who are wondering how we navigate our way through the Arctic Ocean, across the Arctic Ocean. Navigation is basically using something you trust to keep you heading the right direction. For example, kids hold adults' hands to keep them going the right way. We use handrails on stairways and in dark corridors; we use signs or landmarks, but we have none of these things here on the Arctic Ocean. In fact, any landmarks that we had left us. Two days ago the mountains of Ellesmere Island disappeared and we'll not be seeing them again. And the landmarks that we do have here on the ocean can be very deceiving. John and I today thought we were heading towards something that was 40 feet or higher, kind of a mountain-looking thing, and we started heading towards it and before we knew it we were at the top of it and were very surprised and disappointed to find it was really, really small.
So we don't have landmarks in that way, so what do we use to trust? How do we navigate? We use the sun for one. We know that at 12:15, the sun is directly south of us and our shadows point directly north. We also know that the sun moves 15 degrees every hour, so we can calculate, well, if the sun is over here, it must mean this is where north is. There is a little more to it than that, but that is the gist of it. The disadvantage of that is that if it is cloudy, you don't know where the sun is. There is also the wind; if you know where the wind is coming from you can adjust your direction based on that. The disadvantage is the wind can change or maybe there is no wind.
Then there is the compass. The compass is very trusty. You can use it to find points in the distance to then head to. You do, however, need to know the difference between the magnetic north where the compass is pointing and true north, that is, towards the North Pole. And right now that difference is 77 degrees to the west; in other words, the compass points 77 degrees west of actual north. The disadvantage of that is it is nice to have visibility to use the compass. If you don't have that, it can still work, but it is a little harder.
In the end at the end of the day when we get in our tent and I reach in my pocket, I take out our trusty GPS. We use the DeLorme PN-40. This little device is the only way we can actually know our exact location, our latitude and our longitude. It also helps us figure out how far we have traveled that day, how much we have traveled in total for the expedition, and how far is left to the North Pole. This particular model also tells us the sunrise, when the moon is in the sky. And in the future, we will use this device a lot more than just at the end or at the beginning of every day. We may use it to calculate how much we are drifting on ice that is moving with currents and wind. So eventually this little PN40 will be the only way that we will actually find the Pole itself."
Date: March 15, 2009 Location: N83° 46.166' W074 18.091' Time Traveled: 8 hours 30 minutes Distance Traveled: 3.2 nautical miles AM Temperature: -36°F PM Temperature: -26°F Wind: ~10 knots out of the West
By: John Huston
Audio Transcript:
"This is John calling. Today, Day 14, March 15th, we traveled for 8 hours and 30 minutes today, covered 3.2 hard-earned nautical miles. Temperature in the morning was -36. This evening it warmed up to -26, however, we have a pretty stiff 10-knot wind blowing out of the west that's been with us all day. It's probably picked up, or at least felt like it picked up, in the evening as we are camped in a pretty open area.
Today we crossed 2 leads and traveled across a bunch of old sea ice, with kind of small 1 to 2 meter snow dunes that made it difficult to ski over and also due to the overcast skies, we had lots of low contrast and poor visibility. These snow dunes appear flat, so you kind of run into them and they are not flat and require quite a bit of effort to pull our sleds over.
So around 3 o'clock, Tyler and I skied in what can only be described as a small town of different sea ice formations, all sorts of sizes of rubble, shoebox size, soccer ball size, all the way up to gigantic small building size piled 4 stories tall, formations of ice. It was an absolutely incredible place. And as we skied into this with our pulks, it felt like we were entering a small urban area.
We didn't know how long we would be there, and after some scouting, we realized that we would probably be there for a few hours because this was a joining together or a smashing together of 2 old multi-year ice pans that due to the forces of the Arctic Ocean at some point must have just had some massive crushing and grinding going on and upheaval and this was the result. We named this area "The Colossus", and we spent the next 2-½ hours navigating through The Colossus, first with our small pulks, as they're pretty easy to maneuver. It was kind of almost like mountaineering with a sled behind you. And then together with 2 people on one big pulk at a time to get the larger pulks through the maze. We were able to let go of being in a hurry. We put in our time everyday and we do the best we can. We put in our most effort, and we can only go so quickly, so that mindset allowed us to enjoy the experience and we really felt like little kids in some gigantic playground. I mean if this ice formation area, The Colossus, was in Illinois, it would probably be a little national park.
So we both left with a feeling of strong teamwork, having helped each other through, and a feeling of complete wonderment of having been through such an area that not too many people get to see and that is an example of the power of nature and the power of the Arctic Ocean. It was truly beautiful as well. We got a bunch of photos. After that we skied across a new pan of ice, windswept, and camped behind a little hummock to try to get out of the wind.
It was a good day. We left with a high feeling. We talked to our families and loved ones, which is also a big thing to look forward to every Sunday. We did our surveys for Gloria Leon and the psychological research which we do every Sunday as well.
I would like to give a big hello to all the families and people at CaringBridge who are watching our expedition. CaringBridge.org offers free personalized private websites to individuals and families in health crisis, illness, and treatment, and it allows people to communicate through the Internet to hospital rooms and recovery areas. It provides a special mental support to people in those sorts of crises. Anybody can use CaringBridge at any time in their life, so keep that website in mind, www.caringbridge.org. And we are also trying to raise $100,000 for CaringBridge, so you can go to our website, www.northpole09.com and check out more information about that.
OK, thanks for listening, and more coming tomorrow."
Date: March 14, 2009 Location: N83° 42.946' W074° 16.704' Time Traveled: 8 hours 30 minutes Distance Traveled: 3.7 nautical miles AM Temperature: -42°F PM Temperature: -34°F
Audio Transcript:
"This is the Week in Review. I'd say this week has been about some old and some new. Having survived the bitter cold of the first week, the negative 50's and negative 60° temperatures, we have now moved on to the consistent cold of -30° to -40°. And we've also added now a breeze, which varies in direction, but necessitates the face mask so we've been wearing masks most days this week.
Having left behind the large consistent and amazingly random rubble of the first week of the trip, now it's the every day undulating wind blown landscape separated by veins of rubble where large pads of ice have collided together and thrown up huge obstacles in our path in the way of ridges and sometimes huge boulders.
So now it's, at least every once in a while frustrating, everyday is the same. And now we travel more like nomads across the desert, not surprised and amazed by our location as we were in the first week, but now more of, "how do we get through everyday?" And we decided we do what we can and we do it as well as possible.
So, we're starting to rely to our routines, feeling very good about what we do everyday and being efficient and good to each other and good to our equipment and we travel by the clock. We use our watches, which haven't missed a beat. We trust ourselves, our choices and our gear. We also know that we're in about in the same position as other expeditions that have gone before us. Some have been a little faster, some have been a little slower, but considering how the Arctic Ocean can vary so much from year to year, we feel very confident at this point.
So, here we are at the end of the week. One of the things that we realized is that we can't see the mountains of Northern Canada anymore, which have been consistently behind us. And Ward Hunt, which stood for awhile as a constant reminder, is gone. I was sort of, in my mind, referring to it as the lonely mountain, especially when the sun was behind it. But no more can we see that. So instead we focus more on looking forward. And we look forward with optimism and we're hoping to reach the 84° mark early in the week. That's it for now. Take care."
